AIR TRAGEDIES BRING GRIEF WITHOUT ORDER

When air travel goes wrong, the modern world has given us a script to follow.

Forensic workers in coveralls descend on the crash scene. Police tape seals off the site and keeps the full horror at a distance. There is an orderly numbering of the dead and gathering of the evidence. Bodies are repatriated, funerals are held. Eventually, there is explanation.

Twice this year, when disaster struck two Malaysia Airlines planes, fate has torn up the script. One plane disappeared, leaving investigators combing a vast ocean, a disaster with no wreckage and no bodies.

Another scattered its remains across a vast field, where political unrest made an orderly process impossible. We have been cast adrift, unmoored from the familiar rituals that say: Despite the tragedy, we are still in control.

But two worlds collided when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, filled with holidaymakers and AIDS researchers, was taken down by a missile fired from a war in eastern Ukraine. None of the 298 people aboard was a citizen of Ukraine or Russia.

For many watching on television and computer screens, the images produced a sense of mesmerizing dread, as horrified fascination battled the urge to look away. It felt - as Shakespeare's Macduff says in "Macbeth" - "beyond words and beyond belief."